Operation Prato

Operation Prato

Type	Program or study
Also known as	Operação Prato, Colares

Operation Prato (Portuguese Operação Prato, "Operation Plate", often called "Operation Saucer" in English) was a Brazilian Air Force investigation in late 1977 into reports of strange lights around Colares island in the state of Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon.^[1][7] Residents called the lights chupa-chupa ("sucker-sucker"). They said the lights attacked people with beams, leaving burns and weakness.^[1][3] The operation officially closed after about four months, finding no unusual phenomena. But its records, photographs and the later statements of its commander, Captain Uyrangê Hollanda, have made it one of Brazil's most discussed UFO cases.^[1][7] Files on it were released to Brazil's National Archives from 2009.^[2][7]

Background

According to the Portuguese Wikipedia account, the Colares events were part of a wider wave of reports in 1977 that moved from the Baixada Maranhense region of Maranhão, along the Pará coast, to Marajó Bay and Belém.^[7] Press, radio and television carried stories of traumatic encounters, causing great fear in villages.^[7] The wave is often traced to an incident on Ilha dos Caranguejos in Maranhão on 25 April 1977. One of four woodcutters sleeping on a boat was found dead, and two others had burns. The state's medical examiner attributed the death to a stroke brought on by emotional shock.^[7] Newspapers in Pará reported lights said to suck the blood of victims.^[7]

Official reports later listed symptoms that people described after contact with the lights, including partial paralysis, headaches, superficial burns, intense heat, nausea, tremors, dizziness, weakness and tiny holes in the skin.^[2] Residents of Colares held night vigils, lit fires and set off fireworks to keep the lights away. Many women and children left the area.^[1][3] The mayor of Colares, José Ildone Favacho Soeiro, asked the Air Force for help.^[1]

The operation

The investigation was carried out by intelligence agents of the Air Force's First Regional Air Command (I COMAR) in Belém. The SNI, the military regime's national intelligence service, took part, and the Navy collected stories from fishermen.^[2][7] Its aim was to find out whether there were UFOs on the coast between Pará and Maranhão.^[2]

• First mission, 20 October – 11 November 1977. A team of three agents left Belém on 20 October. Two Air Force doctors visited Colares on 26–27 October, and the base of operations settled there on 29 October.^[7] On 1 November Captain Uyrangê Hollanda took operational command.^[4][7] Agents kept vigils through the night and slept by day. Their logs record lights such as a strong bluish light that moved fast over the water near the Colares lighthouse on 5 November.^[2][7]
• Second mission, 25 November – 5 December 1977. This lasted eleven days and stayed in the town. Agents logged luminous bodies crossing the sky at thousands of metres and at high speed.^[7]
• Later missions. Further missions followed in December 1977. At a farm in São Domingos do Capim, agents measured holes in the ground and logged a light descending to low altitude. Documents indicate further UFO-related missions in 1978.^[7]

The team used a Minolta SRT-101 camera. One frame showed "a white patch, as if it were a light"; another came out black, "as if it had burned the film".^[2] An SNI report noted that the I COMAR team returned to Belém "reserved" about what it had seen. It said there was no consensus among its members, apparently from fear of ridicule by colleagues.^[2] The team leader identified the photo that impressed everyone most as the planet Venus.^[7] In 2007 the son of one of the team's sergeants said he had manipulated and enlarged points of light during film processing so that they looked like flying saucers.^[7]

The operation was closed after finding no unusual phenomena.^[1] The English and Portuguese Wikipedia accounts differ slightly on its length. One says about four months of investigation spanning 1977–1978. The other says it officially ended in late December 1977, with related missions in 1978.^[1][7] Yahoo News, citing ufologists, reported a 2,000-page report with 500 photographs and 16 hours of film. The sources read here do not confirm those figures.^[3]

Reported injuries

The physician Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, who worked at the Colares health unit, described lesions to the face or chest that looked like radiation injuries, with reddening, hair loss, blackened skin and small puncture marks.^[3] She later said she had been "compelled" by the Air Force to tell patients their injuries were hallucinations. She rejected mass hysteria as an explanation.^[3] By contrast, the Air Force medical mission of 26–27 October examined two possible victims. It concluded that their symptoms were a normal adrenergic "fight or flight" reaction to fear.^[7]

The ufologist Jacques Vallée, who interviewed Carvalho during a visit to Brazil in 1988, reported that several people had died from the lights and that injuries were consistent with microwave radiation.^[1][7] Other ufologists claimed that the lights drew blood from 400 people. That claim is unverified.^[1] Some witnesses described small beings piloting the craft.^[3]

Hollanda's account

In 1997, two decades later, Hollanda gave a long interview to the ufologists Ademar José Gevaerd and Marco Antônio Petit of the magazine UFO, and spoke at a UFO association that September.^[1][7] He described how frightened his men had been. He said he and SNI agents had seen a large object with a black underside and an amber light during a night vigil. He also recounted residents' reports of beings in protective clothing firing beams, and lights entering and leaving the sea, which led some to speculate about an underwater base.^[3][7] A 2014 analysis of the official observation records found only one entry that roughly matched his account, and Hollanda was not present at it.^[7]

About three months after the interview Hollanda was found dead at his home. His death was apparently a suicide, and it fuelled conspiracy theories.^[1][3] The Brazilian TV programme Linha Direta later featured the case, with Hollanda, Carvalho, the Colares mayor, fishermen and ufologists among its subjects.^[5]

Release of documents

Yahoo News reported that several pages were released in 2004, showing drawings and photographs.^[3] In 2004 the Brazilian Commission of Ufologists (CBU) led a petition campaign for release of UFO information. On 26 December 2007 it filed a request with the presidency.^[2][7] The first 213 pages of Air Force papers, dated 1952 to 1969, arrived in October 2008. In December 2008 an 86-page confidential SNI report on the operation followed. It described objects seen over Colares on 16 and 22 October 1977, including a "cylindrical, almost conical" object.^[2] On 23 April 2009 the Air Force documentation centre sent the first Operation Prato documents to the National Archives in Brasília, and the presidency's security office released further SNI pages that year.^[7] Many other reports, sketches and drawings were leaked over the years by Gevaerd.^[7] The earlier version of this article cited O Estado de S. Paulo on the releases. That page could not be read here.^[6]

Most Brazilian ufologists regard the phenomena as extraterrestrial. A minority of researchers favour other explanations, linking the chupa-chupa to social behaviour and the human psyche, and the lights to a foreign or unexplained terrestrial aerial operation.^[7] See Varginha UFO incident and 1986 Brazilian UFO incident.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Operação Prato”, “Operação Prato (Portuguese)”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.